which is the loof and which is the lirpa?

Eleven years ago, I worked for a company called Pure Atria. It was the brilliantly named result of a merger between two companies originally named (wait for it) - Pure... and Atria. I had joined Atria a year and a half earlier. The takeover had happened, and the founder of Pure had no idea what to do with our company. So we at the original Atria were fairly miserable as the Pure guys went about destroying our nice little organization. Old timers were justifiably abandoning ship. It was a frustrating time.

That year, we experienced an incredible snow storm that started on March 31. I remember having to stay late at work and being extremely angry about the circumstances. By the time I could leave work, I had to run a work-errand first. I had to drive in the opposite direction of home, on the highway, with 18-wheelers for company. I have been pissed off at work before, but rarely that intensely. It was a good thing that we couldn't go back to work for two days because I needed at least that much time to calm down. It probably helped that I had a lot of physical work to do (shovelling); I'm sure that helped me work off some of my angst.

In those days, we didn't read work email at home. When we finally returned to the office, there were a few memos waiting for us. One was sent the day after the snowstorm. It said that Rational Software was buying Pure Atria. It was sent from a corporate account and was the usual standard format blah-de-blah, we are pleased to announce, etc etc, and probably used words and phrases such as "synergy" and "looking forward". Great.

The next one was from the President and Grand Screw-up Poobah of Pure Atria. He said that obviously someone had hacked into the computer system, and wasn't that memo the funniest thing? He thought it was such a great April Fool's joke that he'd sent it off to his buddies at Rational so they could share in the hilarity.

Then the following week, we received *another* memo saying that Rational was buying Pure Atria, this time for real. It was enough to make your head spin. And interestingly, all the old-timers who hadn't left yet decided to stick around for a while longer. The early Rational years were a lot of fun -- hard work, but good times.

And the pagsup of Pure Atria -- Reed Hastings? After he was unceremoniously booted out of Rational, he went off to found a little company whose premise sounded crazy at the time. Their vision was to rent DVDs over the internet. What a dumb idea! Except that the world now knows that little company as Netflix.